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One hyper-heuristic approach to two timetabling problems in health care

Publication ,  Journal Article
Bilgin, B; Demeester, P; Misir, M; Vancroonenburg, W; Vanden Berghe, G
Published in: Journal of Heuristics
June 1, 2012

We present one general high-level hyper-heuristic approach for addressing two timetabling problems in the health care domain: the patient admission scheduling problem and the nurse rostering problem. The complex combinatorial problem of patient admission scheduling has only recently been introduced to the research community. In addition to the instance that was introduced on this occasion, we present a new set of benchmark instances. Nurse rostering, on the other hand, is a well studied operations research problem in health care. Over the last years, a number of problem definitions and their corresponding benchmark instances have been introduced. Recently, a new nurse rostering problem description and datasets were introduced during the first Nurse Rostering Competition. In the present paper, we focus on this nurse rostering problem description. The main contribution of the paper constitutes the introduction of a general hyper-heuristic approach, which is suitable for addressing two rather different timetabling problems in health care. It is applicable without much effort, provided a set of low-level heuristics is available for each problem. We consider the instances of both health care problems for testing the general applicability of the hyper-heuristic approach. Also, improvements to the previous best results for the patient admission scheduling problem are presented. Solutions to the new nurse rostering instances are presented and compared with results obtained by an integer linear programming approach. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Duke Scholars

Published In

Journal of Heuristics

DOI

EISSN

1572-9397

ISSN

1381-1231

Publication Date

June 1, 2012

Volume

18

Issue

3

Start / End Page

401 / 434

Related Subject Headings

  • Operations Research
  • 4901 Applied mathematics
  • 4602 Artificial intelligence
  • 0802 Computation Theory and Mathematics
  • 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
  • 0102 Applied Mathematics
 

Citation

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ICMJE
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Bilgin, B., Demeester, P., Misir, M., Vancroonenburg, W., & Vanden Berghe, G. (2012). One hyper-heuristic approach to two timetabling problems in health care. Journal of Heuristics, 18(3), 401–434. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-011-9192-0
Bilgin, B., P. Demeester, M. Misir, W. Vancroonenburg, and G. Vanden Berghe. “One hyper-heuristic approach to two timetabling problems in health care.” Journal of Heuristics 18, no. 3 (June 1, 2012): 401–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-011-9192-0.
Bilgin B, Demeester P, Misir M, Vancroonenburg W, Vanden Berghe G. One hyper-heuristic approach to two timetabling problems in health care. Journal of Heuristics. 2012 Jun 1;18(3):401–34.
Bilgin, B., et al. “One hyper-heuristic approach to two timetabling problems in health care.” Journal of Heuristics, vol. 18, no. 3, June 2012, pp. 401–34. Scopus, doi:10.1007/s10732-011-9192-0.
Bilgin B, Demeester P, Misir M, Vancroonenburg W, Vanden Berghe G. One hyper-heuristic approach to two timetabling problems in health care. Journal of Heuristics. 2012 Jun 1;18(3):401–434.
Journal cover image

Published In

Journal of Heuristics

DOI

EISSN

1572-9397

ISSN

1381-1231

Publication Date

June 1, 2012

Volume

18

Issue

3

Start / End Page

401 / 434

Related Subject Headings

  • Operations Research
  • 4901 Applied mathematics
  • 4602 Artificial intelligence
  • 0802 Computation Theory and Mathematics
  • 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
  • 0102 Applied Mathematics